


Max Effect: The Prophet Arterial

by MalcolmInSpace



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mass Effect, fury road
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Eden Prime, Gen, Mass Effect 1, Post-Apocalypse, Soldier (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 15:09:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4064515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmInSpace/pseuds/MalcolmInSpace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard's world is fire and blood.  An ancient evil has returned to the wasteland, and many difficult choices lie ahead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Max Effect: The Prophet Arterial

The desert air was thick with smoke and dust. Burning crops, burning homes, burning bodies. The death of a steading. This one was called Reclamation and lay in the shadow of the Damning Wall. The ruins of its greenhouses and quiet water were softened under a mourning veil of haze.

Shepard, Wrathful Seventh of the Legion, looked down upon this devastation and felt very little. So end all things in wasteland, no matter how fruitful they be. She and her roamer-squad lay behind a rust-mound on the hills above, attracted from their patrol by the greasy column of smoke that stood above the steading like an exclamation mark. Or a tombstone.

“Shepard,” hissed Spendable Jenkins, “Look. Behind the paling.”

Shepard peeked across the rust-garden between her cover and and the scrap-fence that ringed the steading. Just a suggestion of movement, the faint clink of metal. Ambush. The paling hadn’t kept out the raiders, but now it sheltered them. The paling was shoulder-high and there would be a firestep behind, Shepard knew. Past the wall a thicket of ramshack windmills that creaked and wobbled in the little wind. No breeze to blow away the smoke or power the lights.

“I smell guns and nantech,” muttered the Weirding Kaid from her left. “Must be Eye Clan.”

“Naw, can’t be,” Jenkins smarmed, “They haven’t come within a hundred treks of a Chloro-town, not since The Butchery. Probably just some slopskin dust-ronin looking for an easy pillage. Gristle for us.”

Shepard ground her teeth. Jenkins was a Spendable Neophyte, just a war-pup looking for his first arm-brands and as convinced of his own destiny as they all were before they learned the Waste-Wisdom, but he seemed sure as sure that standing in Shepard’s air gave him some of her exper, like he’d been there to shovel corpses into the render-pit after the Butchery and was sage with battle. It made her grind her teeth.

“It would take more than just dust-ronin to siege a Chloro-town with walls and a Spendable ‘tachment,” Kaid responded. “‘Sides, slopskin are scared of Lasting Places like that wall.” He gestured to the Damning Wall, towering grey heights holding the canyon walls apart. Scarred, cracked, Lasting. The old savvies said it turned water into power once, before just having water made you powerful.

Jenkins just grinned wider and stroked his rifle. “So let’s go get stuck in, then. If they’re not slopskin maybe they’re better, someone ominous enough to give us a real bangarang.”

“Glory’s just the shine on a gravestone, Spendable. Let the Door wait a while.”

Jenkins opened his mouth to banter back but Shepard shut his noise with a glare and waved him left and he went with a grin, envisioning glory and promotion out of the Spendables. She slipped right around the rust-mound tailed by the Weirding. The scuttled slantwise down the hill behind a line of oxidizing junk, metal too rotted to salvage and planted in the hill face to hold the soil in place. Maybe someday there’d be trees again for that.

They made it within ten ems of the paling and now Shepard could smell the foefolk now. Unwashed bodies, cordite, and something else. Something like the smell of the silicon pits when the fires flared up. Beside her, Kaid was Weirding, calling up the nantech freakery that grew through his veins and his bones and his brain. Blue lights pulsed beneath his flesh and he began to smell of ozone.

Shepard opened her mouth to give the signal but Jenkins popped up first, screaming his name for the ravens to hear and punching rifle fire into the paling. “Witness me! WITNESS M-“ Something heavy, belt-fed and crew-served, screamed back from a shadowed lair among the windmills. The heavy bullets sawed him almost in half. The ravens had his name, and now they would have his guts.

Shepard saw all of this in her periphery as she moved, jogged, advanced towards the paling. Gun up and head low. Kaid a step behind. Shepard was up and over the wall and then her world narrowed to the paraprt. Two foefolk in regalia unfamiliar turning towards her, but her rifle spoke and knocked them down to bleed. Gunfire to her left. She turned and shot another as he climbed the step while Kaid hurled slams of force into the belly of one and pulped her like a rotten kinda-matoe.

Kaid was wrapped in a Weirding Barrier, shifting planes and angles of energy making him look like a few-poly sim on a cracked screen. The heavy gun spoke again, thunk-thunk-thunk, and the bullets dumped their kinetic into that shield. It burst, flaring and shattering. Kaid went down toppling boneless but Shepard was already moving, shifting left around the conical bulk of ‘mill before the heavy found her, too. The heavy tried anyways, then quiet.

Shepard sidled canny and caught the gunners reloading. She stormed the gap before their nest and was among them. She shoulder-barged the first into the dust, shot the second and bayoneted the first before he could do much more than groan. A third, one she hadn’t seen, popped out from overwatch atop a ‘mill and tried to end her, but Kaid was back and yanked the foe into the air with a Weirding grasp. A short shriek, a dull thump. Shepard nodded silent thanks and Kaid nodded back.

“Should we go back for Jenkins, make sure he’s sky-facing?” Kaid seemed to be asking more for form than genuine concern for Jenkins’ soul.

Shepard snorted. “He’s not making it through the Door for getting punctured in his first bit of bang-bang. Let him wander a bit before he ‘carnates, maybe it’ll teach him some frost.” Kaid shrugged an if-you-say-so shrug and Shepard nodded an I-do-say-so nod and they moved.

Then gunfire up ahead. The sharp crackle of the foefolks’ guns answered by the throatier bark of a Legion rifle. Shepard and Kaid broke into a joke.

They came out of the breeze-farm and could smell water and green under the pervasive fug of smoke and cordite. Nearby a greenhouse stood, fragile shell cracked open to let the desert wind claw jealously at the leafy within. Inside, the gunfire. A single Legion pinned down by a fistful of foefolk. Even as they savvied the sitch, the Spendable popped up, but rounds centre mass into a foe and slipped away before the return fire bracket her. Bullets ripped up plants and hazed the air with crumbling brown soil.

Shepard and Kaid joined the fight. Kaid flared Weird and yanked a foefolk into the air for Shepard to end bang-bang. The others tried, but they leaked their vitae out just the same.

After it was done, the Spendable said to Shepard, “You’re an answered prayer, Wrathful. I’ve been running and hiding for two days, trying to stay ‘ffective for the retribution. I’m Willful Ash, Spendable Second.”

“Where’s the rest of your ‘tachment, Willful?”

The line of stress and fatigue etched themselves a little deeper into her soot-streaked face. “Dead. Taken. I’ve tried to sky-face the ones I can, but the foefolk take the wounded.”

Kaid was crouching over a corpse, prodding and speculating. They all wore helms of roughly forged iron painted grey and set with scraps of mirror and effigies of candles and lanterns and hand-torches. “Any sav on who they are?”

Willful took a breath. “I think they’re the Lightbringer’s Get.”

Kaid scoffed. “The Get are an old story. They haven’t been seen this side of the Neverstorm in... ever.”

“Sir, they have flashlight helms.”

That seemed to flummox Kaid, and Shepard gripped Willful by the spaulder. “’Haps you better bring me to sav with what got writ here.”

Willful nodded, gathered herself. “They attacked two days ago, maybe three. Just rucked up out of the waste and laid it us. We didn’t have a chance. Most of my ‘tachment died at the wall. Me and my flankers were on perim roamabout and by the time we got back it was over. Walked into an ambush, and I’ve been scuttling ever since.”

“Any sav on their aims? I don’t see trace of looting, and the wrecking’s not thick enough to be a blitz.” Shepard indicated the only incidentally despoiled greenhouse around them. “And where are all the chloro-folk? I’ve barely eyed a solitary corpse.”

“Slaving, then?” Kaid suggested. “Smashing a Chloro-town seems too sharp a risk for the take. After The Butchery, even Eye Clan slave towns think wary of selling Chloro-folk.”

“Not sure. They were herding people ‘neath the Wall, last I saw. And... there’s something else. They have a war-rig dreadful, like nothing I’ve ever seen. It rumbles the earth and the noise... there’s no engine in it I can sav.” Willful gestured past the greenhouse walls. “It smashed in through the north wall, other side of steading.”

“First cares should go to the folk,” Kaid interjected. “If these Get are herding them under the Damning Wall, we should look them before chasing some rig we haven’t got the boom to trouble.”

“I’m minded to agree,” Shepard said. “Spook-story or no, these foefolk came here with purpose, and I’d like to scupper that just on principal. Willful, I got an empty flank on my roamer. It’s yours if you want it.”

Willful did, Shepard could see it in her eyes. Willful was clearly no glory-gorger like Jenkins, but walking with a Wrathful Seventh led you only one direction: through the Door to the Green Places. She shouldered her rifle and her cares and they moved.

 

They sidled savvy through the town until the crested they low rise separating the greenhouse from the homes and...

“Gods and hunger,” Kaid gasped.

It was indeed a war-rig dreadful, a towering monster of grinding tracks and burnished metal that rumbled the ground beneath them even a k away. It snorted thunder and filled the air with a keening whine that speared itself inside your brain. They stood, transfixed, until it hauled its impossible bulk past a hillock and was gone.

“Gods and hunger,” Kaid said again through a dry throat. “What could build a thing like that?”

“The Lightbringer’s Get,” Willful said flatly. “It must be some Lasting Relic they found beyond the Neverstorm.”

Shepard growled, low and full of menace. “Right now, it’s a problem for another day. Come on, let’s go find the chloro-folk. Willful, lead us under the Damning.”


End file.
